Word.ws English Dictionary

flux capacitor

flux capacitor noun: a fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped compartment with three flashing Geissler-style tubes arranged in a "Y" configuration.

flux capacitor: a fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped...
Image: Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

flux capacitor (plural flux capacitors)

  1. A fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped compartment with three flashing Geissler-style tubes arranged in a "Y" configuration.
    • Tucked into the corner of the Rinky Dink Flea Market in Marietta is a time machine that transports its visitors to an era before digital music. It doesn’t need a flux capacitor to work, just a plug to power the vintage stereos and turntables that produce the sounds of the thousands of vinyl records...2019 January 12, Chad Plauche-Adkins, “Playing the classics: Flea market music collection includes thousands of records”, in The Marietta Times
    • Is this a glitch? Is the system experiencing an outage? It is a temptation that is best resisted, the urge to talk about this Chelsea team as a piece of fine-point engineering, to style Thomas Tuchel as a pure systems man, poring over his data charts, banging his dials, reconfiguring the flux...2021 December 4, Barney Ronay, “Thomas Tuchel must gear up for a new phase to reboot glitching Chelsea”, in The Guardian

Forms of flux capacitor

pluralflux capacitors

Origin of flux capacitor

First seen in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in 1984 and in the 1985 American science fiction film Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis, in which a DMC DeLorean vehicle is retrofitted with a flux capacitor to create a time travel device.

Questions about flux capacitor

What does flux capacitor mean?
Flux capacitor means a fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped compartment with three flashing Geissler-style tubes arranged in a "Y" configuration.
What part of speech is flux capacitor?
Flux capacitor is a noun.
What is the plural of flux capacitor?
The plural of flux capacitor is flux capacitors.

Words near flux capacitor in the dictionary

  1. fluviovolcanic
  2. fluvisol
  3. fluvisols
  4. fluvoxamine
  5. flux
  6. flux capacitor
  7. flux capacitors
  8. flux densities
  9. flux density
  10. flux unit
  11. flux units

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flux capacitor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “flux capacitor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/flux_capacitor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.